Saturday, October 29, 2005

Friday, October 28, 2005

After two years of breathless hype and leaky speculation, marked by Randi Rhodes shrieking "TREASON!!!" and Al Franken predicting that Rove and Cheney will be executed, special prosector Patrick Fitzgerald has indicted Lewis "Retarded Nickname For A 55-Year-Old Man" Libby with five counts related to telling fibs. In an act that would've never happened during the Clinton Regime, Scooter has packed his bags and resigned his gig. Such as it is when you're charged with felonies and aren't a Democrat - you go and face the music.

Details are still sketchy and since I'm stuck at work, I haven't had a chance to check Rush's site or listen to Randi Rhodes or Michael Savage's opinions - like I need them to lay the smack down - and I've been piling up Firefox tabs with different interesting bits all day on this slightly moving target of a story, but here's a recap and thoughts about it. (For some reason, Hugh Hewitt has been silent on this, preferring to post more dribblings on the SCOTUS picks - that's so yesterday, Hugh, and you blew it with Miers. Michelle Malkin must be at Pilates class working her fine booty, but I digress...)

There has been much high-minded talk about how the Valerie Plame controversy is really about the case for the Iraq war. No. For liberals, it has always been about inflicting as much damage as possible to the Bush White House, especially by taking out through indictment its most central player in the person of Karl Rove. That has not happened. Nor has special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald alleged a conspiracy at the top levels of the Bush administration to out a CIA agent. What he instead charges in his five-count indictment is that Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, lied to investigators about conversations with three reporters. This long-hyped, two-year investigation appears to come down, in other words, to one man's alleged dishonesty when investigators came knocking. This is not Watergate or Iran-Contra, but neither is it a trifle.

Please spare us the excuses warmed over from Democratic talking points in the 1990s: the prosecutor is out-of-control, there was no underlying crime, etc., etc. It is the responsibility of anyone, especially a public official, to tell the truth to FBI agents and grand juries. If Libby didn't, he should face the consequences.

But conservatives would be well-advised not to start slamming Fitzgerald. We don't know all the facts and until we do, his acts are open to dueling interpretations. It seemed unfair for him to talk at his press conference of Libby damaging national security by revealing classified information, when Libby wasn't charged with that. But this was a departure for the otherwise restrained and responsible Fitzgerald. The Bush administration, for its part, has conducted itself with notable forbearance in this case, avoiding the sort of smears that the Clinton administration routinely resorted to whenever a prosecutor proved inconvenient.

Unfortunately, Republicans and Democrats engage in alternating opportunism over “the criminalization of politics,” and it is the Democrats’ turn to pin their political hopes on the work of a prosecutor.

What I and others find odd is the lack of specifics about things like was Plame really covert and who was Novak's source and if Darth Rove is in the clear or not. Talking Points Memo is going with the sinister moonbat view of things in thinking that a smoking gun exists. I dunno and considering the hallucinatory properties of BDS, I'm not gonna worry about it. (As if I was in the first place.)

It's an All Spin Zone, folks, but who REALLY knows what's up outside of the players on the field? That's right! No one!!! So rather than add to the speculation, let's notice the HYPOCRISY on display from the MSM, shall we?

[W]hen former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy was indicted on 39 counts, the networks aired a single evening news story. Three of the four networks -- ABC, CNN, and NBC -- underlined that the Smaltz inquiry had so far cost $9 million. None of them noted civil penalties originating from targets of Smaltz's inquiry amounted to more than $3.5 million. The next morning, CBS's morning show, called CBS This Morning, didn't even mention Espy's indictment. Months later, I noted in a Media Reality Check that on December 11, former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros was indicted on 18 counts for misleading the FBI about payoffs to a mistress, Linda Medlar. NBC Nightly News filed one story; ABC's World News Tonight gave it 18 seconds. CBS Evening News didn't arrive on the story until the next night, and gave it nine seconds, a fraction of the two minutes Dan Rather gave the nightly El Nino update, about the weather "giving a gentle lift to the monarch butterfly."

Everyone assumed that Miller's source was Snapper. Him and/or Karl Rove (another great name, especially for the official bad guy). He said he didn't mind if she testified. She apparently didn't hear this, so a couple months later he said it louder and she said okay. Then she testified that she couldn't remember who told her that Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA agent, but it wasn't Skippy. And she conceded that much of what she reported in the run-up to the Iraq war, relying on administration leaks, was wrong. So she went to jail to protect a "source" who didn't give her the crucial fact at issue for a story she didn't write, but did give her inaccurate information for other stories. Huh?

He closes with a good note about how the sides have hypocritically flipped:

The Republicans have their own plotline they'd like to impose on this confusing blur of events. It's actually a dusted-off plotline from the Reagan Iran-contra scandal of the 1980s: all about an "overzealous prosecutor" and "bitter partisans" on the other side who want to "politicize policy differences." But two intervening developments have overroasted these chestnuts: Bill Clinton and Yahoo. When Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison preemptively mocked perjury as what prosecutors charge you with if they can't find a real crime, it was the work of minutes for bloggers to find and post her comments from the Clinton impeachment about the transcendent seriousness of a perjury rap.

And that's the irony of this thing: Democrats are suddenly certain that perjury is a serious crime and Stupid Partiers are trying to blow it off.

Um, it IS a serious crime and I'd like to know what was so GD important that a presumably intelligent bloke like Pooter (sp?) needed to lie like a moth-eaten rug as if no one would notice? Who'd he think he was? Bill Clinton?!?

Jeralyn Merritt of TalkLeft complains at the Huffington Post that Karl Rove might avoid serious punishment because he told the truth to the government. Merritt outlines a scenario (which as best I can tell has to be strictly theoretical at this point) in which Rove would "make a plea deal with Fitzgerald under which he agrees to plead guilty if Fitzgerald agrees to request a sentencing reduction to probation, because of his cooperation against others." She then concludes:

As a devout critic of the Bush Administration, I bring it up because I don't like rats. If Karl Rove isn't indicted, or gets a sweetheart deal, I can't conceive of any reason why other than he sang his heart out.

So what's a Bush Administration official supposed to do? I would have thought that telling the truth to investigators about criminal misconduct, including your colleagues' misconduct, is generally part of a government official's job. It's also sometimes the self-interested thing to do, but while that might mean you deserve less credit for it, it doesn't mean you should be condemned for it.

Merritt's view, though, seems to be that Rove would be a "rat," whom she "do[es]n't like," for "s[i]ng[ing] his heart out." Should he compound his initial offense (if he had committed an offense) by failing to do his duty? I've heard people condemn the Bush Administration for placing too much premium on loyalty over other virtues -- but surely few (on the Left or on the Right) would think that Administration officials should place such a premium on loyalty that they refuse to testify about others' criminal conduct? Or is it damned if you do (covering up your colleagues' crimes; shameful!), damned if you don't ("singing" about your colleagues' crimes; shameful!)?

"While I may engage in public discourse, my wife and my family are private people. They did not choose to be brought into the public square, and they do not wish to be under the glare of camera. They are entitled to their privacy."

NewsBusters notices what I've always pointed out: If today's feckless fascist media was around during WWII, we'd be speaking "Japerman" or "Gerpanese".

The excitement and anticipation radiating from the mainstream media, as American deaths in Iraq inched toward the 2,000 mark, has been more than evident. It has also been a time of struggle for those of us who deeply mourn the loss of these heroic young men and women. Now, in addition to the pain and suffering we truly understand, the American public must also endure the pre-planned platitudes of a press strongly opposed to this combat action.

Headlines and editorials condemning the war or calling for withdrawal of our troops have been everywhere. News and editorial leads have all sounded the theme of Washington’s wrong doing. For example, Bob Herbert’s column in the October 27 New York Times reads, “Thousands upon thousands are suffering and dying in Iraq while, in Washington, incompetence continues its macabre marathon dance with incoherence.”

Our national press corps argues that more than 2,000 deaths in two years of combat is far too high a price to pay in American lives. Since this is a war of “incompetence” and “incoherence”, nothing of value has been accomplished and we should turn our backs on Iraq and the midddle east.

It seems those who pour ink onto today’s news pages have forgotten their world history.

For example, between December 16, 1944 and January 25, 1945 the United States sacrificed 19,000 men to guns of Nazi Germany in a single engagement. Another 23,554 soldiers were captured. It was called the “Battle of the Bulge.” Using the logic of today’s media, we should have surrendered the war to our Nazi enemy on the spot.

During World War II there were 9,512 Merchant Marines who gave up their lives to assure American troops were supplied and moved into battle. By today’s press standards those were wasted lives and all shipping should have ceased.

From April 1 until September 7, 1945 a total of 12,000 Americans died and 38,000 were wounded in the battle for Okinawa. People like Bob Herbert would call that Washington bumbling...a battle that should never have been fought.

At Antietam on September 17, 1862 we learn that in a single battle more than 3,500 young men from both the Blue and Grey Armies lay dead on the soil of their own country. Many in the press of that day thought all of the civilian leadership was lacking competence. Still the fight continued and in the end it was the glue of American blood that held the Union together.

All wars stress a nation. The losses, be they a single life or thousands, can never be taken lightly. But, to use death numbers as a media target for speaking out in opposition and defeatism is unconscionable. We all deserve better from those chosen to be our public voice.

To the fascist enemies within, not one life is worth losing if it protects America or serves a Democrat's purposes.

Another member of the 1/5, Cpl. Jeffrey B. Starr, rejected a $24,000 bonus to re-enlist. Corporal Starr believed strongly in the war, his father said, but was tired of the harsh life and nearness of death in Iraq. So he enrolled at Everett Community College near his parents' home in Snohomish, Wash., planning to study psychology after his enlistment ended in August.

But he died in a firefight in Ramadi on April 30 during his third tour in Iraq. He was 22.

Sifting through Corporal Starr's laptop computer after his death, his father found a letter to be delivered to the marine's girlfriend. ''I kind of predicted this,'' Corporal Starr wrote of his own death. ''A third time just seemed like I'm pushing my chances.''

Last night, I received a letter from Corporal Starr's uncle, Timothy Lickness. He wanted you to know the rest of the story--and the parts of Corporal Starr's letter that the Times failed to include:

Yesterday's New York Times on-line edition carried the story of the 2000 Iraq US military death[s]. It grabbed my attention as the picture they used with the headline was that of my nephew, Cpl Jeffrey B. Starr, USMC.

Unfortunately they did not tell Jeffrey's story. Jeffrey believed in what he was doing. He [was] willing put his life on the line for this cause. Just before he left for his third tour of duty in Iraq I asked him what he thought about going back the third time. He said: "If we (Americans) don't do this (free the Iraqi people from tyranny) who will? No one else can."

Several months after Jeffrey was killed his laptop computer was returned to his parents who found a letter in it that was addressed to his girlfriend and was intended to be found only if he did not return alive. It is a most poignant letter and filled with personal feelings he had for his girlfriend. But of importance to the rest of us was his expression of how he felt about putting his life at risk for this cause. He said it with grace and maturity.

He wrote: "Obviously if you are reading this then I have died in Iraq. I kind of predicted this, that is why I'm writing this in November. A third time just seemed like I'm pushing my chances. I don't regret going, everybody dies but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq, it's not to me. I'm here helping these people, so that they can live the way we live. Not have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is why I died. Others have died for my freedom, now this is my mark."

What Jeffrey said is important. Americans need to understand that most of those who are or have been there understand what's going on. It would honor Jeffrey's memory if you would publish the rest of his story.

When is the Times going to change it's motto to "All the news that fits our agenda."?

I stumbled over this old Salon.com article, "Gay 'Trek'", cataloging the complaints of gay sci-fi fans that none of the "Star Trek" series portrayed gays in space. The beef is based on the idea that since "Star Trek" is supposed to portray a enlightened (read: liberal) social Utopia of tolerance and understanding, there should be open displays of same-sex love and affection between bumpy-foreheaded people of all (prosthetic) colors and species.

While it catalogs the rank homobigotry - "homophobia" is a misnomer - of some of the Trek producers, what it overlooks is the cyborg elephant in the spaceship: Genetic engineering. It's said that homosexuality is born into people and not simply a "lifestyle choice", so if a preference for tight jeans is in the genes, why is it impossible to conceive of those genes being altered?

If the promise of genetic engineering (in conjunction with an agressive abortion policy for fetuses that can't be fixed) is to weed out all the negative genetic flaws, such as Down's Syndrome, left-handedness and a taste for Kenny G records, what's to say that in the future homosexuality will be eradicated medically as an undesirable flaw, like frizzy hair?

While it's SOP to blame the lack of [oppressed grievance group] on TV shows because of fearful racist/sexist/bigoted white men, in this case, pertaining to a future with faster-than-light travel and teleporters, it falls flat.

The reason there are no gays on "Star Trek" is because there are no gays in the future

Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and at Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the rich and accomplished and successful of Washington, and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they're living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they're going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley's off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.

I suspect that history, including great historical novelists of the future, will look back and see that many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives while they waited for the next chapter of trouble. And that they consciously, or unconsciously, took grim comfort in this thought: I got mine. Which is what the separate peace comes down to, "I got mine, you get yours."

You're a lobbyist or a senator or a cabinet chief, you're an editor at a paper or a green-room schmoozer, you're a doctor or lawyer or Indian chief, and you're making your life a little fortress. That's what I think a lot of the elites are up to.

Not all of course. There are a lot of people--I know them and so do you--trying to do work that helps, that will turn it around, that can make it better, that can save lives. They're trying to keep the boat afloat. Or, I should say, get the trolley back on the tracks.

That's what I think is going on with our elites. There are two groups. One has made a separate peace, and one is trying to keep the boat afloat. I suspect those in the latter group privately, in a place so private they don't even express it to themselves, wonder if they'll go down with the ship. Or into bad territory with the trolley.

And what's saddest is that so many people don't even care that it's all going to hell; they just want THEIR PEOPLE at the helm to get more for them on the way down.

An ever-growing peeve of mine lately is the resurrection of the phrase, "Speaking truth to power," which ONLY comes from the lips of the Left as they congratulate themselves for sticking it to Team Dubya et al. The fact that a lot of these "truths" are seditious lies to undermine America isn't advertised as much.

Ignoring George Clooney's new liberal-porn film, "Good Night, and Stalin's Not Such A Bad Guy Once You Get To Know Him", I saw that there's something in Vanity Fair this month about how the media's Al Jazeera-worthy coverage of Hurricane Katrina was an epocal moment in news reporting because....well, you know, that something to someone thing.

Now, I haven't read the whole piece yet and if anything needs to be ammended here, I will, but the general tenor of the piece that I gather is that it doesn't matter that there weren't actually 10,000 dead in New Orleans; it didn't matter that there weren't stacked corpses in the Convention Center freezer; it didn't matter that unconfirmed speculation and outright fantasies were given the weight of fact by a credulous media driven to embarrass and destroy Dubya at all costs, even the Truth.

Noooooooooo!!! This was "Speaking Truth To Power". Please. I wonder if Dan Rather is considered to be a "Truth to Power" speaker? It'd be funny if he was because most people know he was just a bad liar who finally got caught.

Lousy SCOTUS pick and latest example of Team Dubya's tone-deafness, Harriet Miers, withdrew her nomination today after a long month of causing fits in the conservative community as those who want a good pick clashed with those who believe that propping up Dubya is more important than a sound judicial candidate for the out-of-control court.

Hugh Hewitt's been the loudest voice in favor of Miers and, frankly, he's been an absolute crybaby about all this and weakened his conservative cred in my eyes with his nasty attacks against folks like George Will, Charles Krauthammer and the NRO gang. Hugh's diaper-filling reaction is here and I hope he gets the fook over it because he was backing the wrong horse for the wrong reason.

If Dems tried to foist a hack like Miers on the court - ignoring the fact that Dems never fail to defend their owm - folks like Hewitt would be hell-bent on their defeat, but since it's weak-old-Dubya who's suffering from many self-inflicted wounds and many more unfair smears by the media, it's rally around the leader time. Pass, Hugh.

It was suspected that he was paid off by Team Saddam to carry his water and now it's been proven:

Just before my last exchange with George Galloway, which occurred on the set of Bill Maher's show in Los Angeles in mid-September, I was approached by a representative of the program and asked if I planned to repeat my challenge to Galloway on air. That challenge—would he sign an affidavit saying that he had never discussed Oil-for-Food monies with Tariq Aziz?—I had already made on a public stage in New York. Maher's producers had been asked, obviously by a nervous Galloway, to find out whether I had brought such an affidavit along with me. I replied that this was not necessary, since his public denial to me was on the record and had been broadcast, and since it further confirmed the apparent perjury that he had committed in front of the U.S. Senate on May 17, 2005. I added that I wanted no further contact with Galloway until I could have the opportunity of reviewing his prison diaries.

That day has now been brought measurably closer by the publication of the report of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. This report, which comes with a vast archive of supporting material, was embargoed until 10 p.m. Monday and contains the "smoking gun" evidence that Galloway, along with his wife and his chief business associate, were consistent profiteers from Saddam Hussein's regime and its criminal exploitation of the "Oil for Food" program. In particular:

1) Between 1999 and 2003, Galloway personally solicited and received eight oil "allocations" totaling 23 million barrels, which went either to him or to a politicized "charity" of his named the Mariam Appeal.

2) In connection with just one of these allocations, Galloway's wife, Amineh Abu-Zayyad, received about $150,000 directly.

3) A minimum of $446,000 was directed to the Mariam Appeal, which campaigned against the very sanctions from which it was secretly benefiting.

4) Through the connections established by the Galloway and "Mariam" allocations, the Saddam Hussein regime was enabled to reap $1,642,000 in kickbacks or "surcharge" payments.

Taken together with the scandal surrounding Benon Sevan, the U.N. official responsible for "running" the program, and with the recent arrest of Ambassador Jean-Bernard Mérimée (France's former U.N. envoy) in Paris, and with other evidence about pointing to big bribes paid to French and Russian politicians like Charles Pasqua and Vladimir Zhirinovsky, what we are looking at is a well-organized Baathist attempt to buy or influence the member states of the U.N. Security Council. One wonders how high this investigation will reach and how much it will eventually explain.

Yet this is the man who received wall-to-wall good press for insulting the Senate subcommittee in May, and who was later the subject of a fawning puff piece in the New York Times, and who was lionized by the anti-war movement when he came on a mendacious and demagogic tour of the country last month. I wonder if any of those who furnished him a platform will now have the grace to admit that they were hosting a man who is not just a pimp for fascism but one of its prostitutes as well.

Phony war hero and serial golddigger John "three papercuts and out" Kerry spoke (and still speaks) of "the Global Test" that American needs to pass before being allowed to defend itself from its enemies which meant we needed permission from the countries and organizations being paid off to oppose us. Nice.

As many flavors of suck Dubya is, he's still better than the alternatives we had. That says less about his quality than it does about the screaming void the Dems are. The only thing the Stupid Party has going for them is that the Dems are clearly worse and voters aren't ready to move from holding their noses to commiting suicide.

I wonder if the MSM will report this news? Judging from the fact that they chose to fetishize and celebrate the 2000th dead soldier over the ratification of the Iraqi Constitution, it appears they won't; it breaks their preordained storylike of: America bad, America bad, world hates America because it's bad, Dubya lied, Plame game, Rove, Libby, treason, America bad, war not worth it, Viet Nam, blah, blah, woof, woof.

The fact that non-Kool Aid drinkers knew that Iraq was bribing countries to oppose us and the UN Oil-For-Food program was a scam THREE YEARS AGO is lost on people commited to advancing the fascist-liberal agenda of destroying America and installing despotic rule under the UN and American Fascist Democratic Party.

Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Hollywood types love to proclaim the uber-superiority of Europe with its Socialist Utopian promise and blah-blah-woof-woof, so it's ironic that one of the worst "filmmakers" working now benefits from a ridiculous tax rebate law in Germany that sounds like something out of "The Producers".

Check out "Uwe Boll: Money For Nothing" and understand why the vitriol hurled towards George Lucas over the "Star Wars" prequels is so misplaced.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: Michael Moore makes money off oil and war? Why would he bother lying about owning stock? Is Peter Schweizer the only person who bothered checking?

Peter Schweizer:Michael Moore is constantly trying to prove his and the Left's moral superiority, so he says things about himself that are patently not true. He's pathological about it. How else to explain that he's loudly proclaimed no less than three times that he doesn't invest in the stock market because it's morally wrong while quietly picking up shares in a whole host of companies. A portfolio that includes Halliburton, Boeing, and HMOs doesn't fit the bill so he lies about it. I think he assumed that no one would poke around and investigate. When it comes to the MSM he was correct in making that assumption. He never responded to my questions. I'm dying to know how he explains away this one.

Lopez: Where did you get the idea for Do As I Say...? Did you just know the line of inquiry would be productive or did something fall into your lap?

Schweizer: I got tired of having discussions and arguments with people on the Left who operate on the assumption that they possess the moral high ground. They're not greedy, they're the only ones who truly care about the poor, minorities, you name it. Knowing quite a few people on the Left I knew that wasn't true. So I started poking around — looking at tax returns, IRS filings, court documents, etc. Frankly, it's amazing how easy it was to find examples of lefties being completely hypocritical.

Lopez: Given the hypocrisy you expose on this front, please tell me Nancy Pelosi at least isn't a Wal-Mart basher.

Schweizer: Nancy Pelosi bashes everyone who doesn't allow unions to call the shots. Everyone that is except herself. It's takes an amazing amount of gall to accept the Cesar Chavez Award from the United Farmworkers Unions while using non-UFW workers on your Napa Valley Vineyard. It takes the same to praise the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union and take massive sums of money from them all the while keeping them out of your Hotel and chain of restaurants. But again, I think Pelosi correctly assumes that no one in the media will challenge her on this.

Lopez: Um and the Clinton's underwear? Though the Clinton's claiming $4 per pair of used underwear among their charitable contributions does seem like it is begging for a New York Post cover.

Schweizer: Ah, yes, the Clintons, who profess to pay the maximum amount on their taxes every year because it's the right thing to do. The Clintons are simply amazing in their ability to lecture Americans about their need to pay more taxes while at the same time finding lucrative tax shelters and taking outrageous tax deductions. Again, the media gives them a free pass.

Schweizer: I'm not sure that most people take Franken seriously, but the media most assuredly does. He professes to be more than a comedian. He claims to be a political analyst and apparently wants to be a U.S. senator. (His former writing partner says he really wants to be president. Yikes!) His vicious attacks against conservatives as racists are not meant to be funny. He really does think that we're bigots. So questions about his absolutely abysmal record when it comes to hiring minorities should be exposed. (For those who want a hint, less than one percent of his employees have been black. That's a worse record than Bob Jones University, which Franken claims is "racist.")

Lopez: So he lies you say? At heart, he's a comedian. Does it really matter?

Schweizer: Yes it does matter. Among the liberal/Left base, they see Franken as some sort of prophet who speaks the truth. And again, the media gives him a free pass. I caught him on The Late Show with David Letterman last Friday. They chuckled a bit and Franken went on to explain his twisted and distorted view of the world. He wasn't challenged on anything he said.

Lopez: About Franken, he wanted to fight our Rich Lowry. You nervous now that your book is out?

Schweizer: I tried to get Franken to answer my questions. I wanted him to explain some of the outrageous comments he made a few years ago about disliking homosexuals and the fact that he was glad one had been killed. (Imagine if a conservative had said that?) And I wanted to ask him why he considered conservatives and Republicans racist because they hired so few blacks when he had such a horrible record himself. Alas, he never responded.

Lopez: Any Lefties you checked into who came out with flying non-hypocritical colors worth lauding for at least practicing what they preach?

Schweizer: I really thought that Ralph Nader would be that man. He lives a monk-like existence and tends to shun the material things in life. But then I discovered that he fired some of his employees for trying to form a union and I realized he wouldn't fit the bill. I'm still looking....

Lopez: One overarching kinda question: We all have our moments of hypocrisy. That we don't practice what we preach doesn't make what we preach any less valid. People are human, etc. Is there something about your book that is somewhat fundamentally unfair?

Schweizer: Yes, we are all hypocrites and I talk about that in the book. But liberal hypocrisy and conservative hypocrisy are quite different on two accounts. First, you hear about conservative hypocrisy all the time. A pro-family congressman caught in an extramarital affair, a minister caught in the same. This stuff is exposed by the media all the time. The leaders of the liberal-Left get a complete pass on their hypocrisy. Second, and this is even more important, the consequences of liberal hypocrisy are different than for the conservative variety. When conservatives abandon their principles and become hypocrites, they end up hurting themselves and their families. Conservative principles are like guard rails on a winding road. They are irritating but fundamentally good for you. Liberal hypocrisy is the opposite. When the liberal-left abandon their principles and become hypocrites, they actually improve their lives. Their kids end up in better schools, they have more money, and their families are more content. They're ideas are truly that bad.

Lopez: Is there something about the book that sums something up philosophically about the Left?

Schweizer: After researching the book I really truly believe that the leading lights of the Left — Moore, Franken, Clinton, Pelosi, Kennedy, etc. — really honestly don't believe what they are selling us. Their own experiences teach them that their ideas don't work.

Lopez: So I can't stand Michael Moore anyway. I really don't need any more anger aimed in his direction. Ditto with some others who get chapters in your book. Why should I read your book anyway? How might a Michael Moore fan get something out of Do As I Say...?

Schweizer: All I would ask a Michael Moore fan do is look at the facts. Moore professes to hate capitalism ("the last evil empire" he's called it) but practices it in spades. Moore condemns people for their racism and claims to support and practice affirmative action, but has a lousy record of hiring minorities. He outsources post-production film work to Canada so he can pay non-union wages. I could go on and on. I would ask his fans: is this really a sincere person?

Lopez: What's the funniest story you learned while compiling the book?

Schweizer: It has to be one about Michael Moore. In his books Michael Moore goes on and on about the fact that Americans are racist because they live in white neighborhoods. It's an example of latent segregationist attitudes in his mind. When I checked the demographics on Michael Moore's residence I burst out laughing. Michael Moore lives in a town of 2,500 in Michigan. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there is not a single black person in the entire town.

On the drive in, the local Hate Speech Radio hostette was dampening her panties in anticipation of the great political windfall the death of the 2000th soldier in Iraq (Dems love our troops, but only when they die to their benefit) and how the Left was hoping for everyone on Team Dubya to be charged with treason and impeached and imprisoned over Joe Wilson's masterful maneuver of making his lies and outing of his own wife into a problem for the Administration. (To he credit, she wasn't predicting executions out loud like Al Franken did.)

IN PRESIDENT BUSH'S first term, some of the most important decisions about U.S. national security — including vital decisions about postwar Iraq — were made by a secretive, little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

But it's absolutely true. I believe that the decisions of this cabal were sometimes made with the full and witting support of the president and sometimes with something less. More often than not, then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice was simply steamrolled by this cabal.

Its insular and secret workings were efficient and swift — not unlike the decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy. This furtive process was camouflaged neatly by the dysfunction and inefficiency of the formal decision-making process, where decisions, if they were reached at all, had to wend their way through the bureaucracy, with its dissenters, obstructionists and "guardians of the turf."

But the secret process was ultimately a failure. It produced a series of disastrous decisions and virtually ensured that the agencies charged with implementing them would not or could not execute them well.

I knew that what I was observing was not what Congress intended when it passed the 1947 National Security Act. The law created the National Security Council — consisting of the president, vice president and the secretaries of State and Defense — to make sure the nation's vital national security decisions were thoroughly vetted.

Discounting the professional experience available within the federal bureaucracy — and ignoring entirely the inevitable but often frustrating dissent that often arises therein — makes for quick and painless decisions. But when government agencies are confronted with decisions in which they did not participate and with which they frequently disagree, their implementation of those decisions is fractured, uncoordinated and inefficient. This is particularly the case if the bureaucracies called upon to execute the decisions are in strong competition with one another over scarce money, talented people, "turf" or power.

It takes firm leadership to preside over the bureaucracy. But it also takes a willingness to listen to dissenting opinions. It requires leaders who can analyze, synthesize, ponder and decide.

There's more to his blather, but I quote these bits to point out the utter contradictions and whining hypocrisy of his unfounded arguments. First he says that the NSC is supposed to include the Prez, Veep, Sec. of State and Sec. of Defense, but this is after he's complained that three of these four officers are part of this cabal. Huh?!? If a dozen people are supposed to have a say and a few are undercutting the majority, then you may have a secret cabal, but as he himself lays it out, the PEOPLE WHO ARE SUPPOSED TO BE MAKING THE DECISIONS ARE MAKING THE DECISIONS!!!

So what's the problem? The problem is that he and his fellow travellers in the anti-American CIA and State Dept. don't like that Team Dubya isn't bending the nation's knee to the wishes of the UN and the EU and are now calling about their seditious accomplices in the MSM to spread the smear that something fishy is going on when the system is working as designed.

The key hint is when he talks about how the bureaucracy rebels against decisions it doesn't agree with or didn't get to determine which begs this question: Who the hell is working for whom and who's higher on the org chart?!? Seems to me that the Prez's should have his will done and the people spewing sedition certainly wouldn't be saying a peep if it was a President Kerry plotting with Kofi Anan to sign our sovereignty over to the UN, declaring martial law and rounding up non-fascist sympathizers into camps for re-education and/or disposal.

Nope, it's only bad when it's the people not interested in seeing America destroyed making the decisions. Pffft.

To adults, "oral sex is extremely intimate, and to some of these young people, apparently it isn't as much," says Sarah Brown, director of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy.

"What we're learning here is that adolescents are redefining what is intimate."

Among teens, oral sex is often viewed so casually that it needn't even occur within the confines of a relationship. Some teens say it can take place at parties, possibly with multiple partners. But they say the more likely scenario is oral sex within an existing relationship.

Still, some experts are increasingly worrying that a generation that approaches intimate behavior so casually might have difficulty forming healthy intimate relationships later on.

"My parents' generation sort of viewed oral sex as something almost greater than sex. Like once you've had sex, something more intimate is oral sex," says Carly Donnelly, 17, a high school senior from Cockeysville, Md.

"Now that some kids are using oral sex as something that's more casual, it's shocking to (parents)."

David Walsh, a psychologist and author of the teen-behavior book Why Do They Act That Way?, says the brain is wired to develop intense physical and emotional attraction during the teenage years as part of the maturing process. But he's disturbed by the casual way sex is often portrayed in the media, which he says gives teens a distorted view of true intimacy.

Sex — even oral sex — "just becomes kind of a recreational activity that is separate from a close, personal relationship," he says.

"When the physical part of the relationship races ahead of everything else, it can almost become the focus of the relationship," Walsh says, "and they're not then developing all of the really important skills like trust and communication and all those things that are the key ingredients for a healthy, long-lasting relationship."

"Intimacy has been so devalued," says Doris Fuller of Sandpoint, Idaho, who, with her two teenage children, wrote the 2004 book Promise You Won't Freak Out, which discusses topics such as teen oral sex.

"What will the impact be on their ultimately more lasting relationships? I don't think we know yet."

Now, I enjoy getting blown by a nubile teenaged girl as much as the next guy (or panda), but what's missing amongst all this "concern" is anyone stepping up and saying, "You know kids, you may want to hold off on all the bukkake parties until you're old enough to vote." Unfortunately, self-control is strictly verbotten by the liberal culture police and as a result, AIDS, illegitimacy and abortion will continue to increase. Is everyone having fun now?

Bench Memos on National Review Online has a pathetic letter that the Stupid Party High Command is circulating to try and get women to show gender solidarity and back Dubya's lousy pick of Harriet Meirs. Here's the wrapup:

Just a few very quick questions and observations:

1) Did the RNC ever ask put out a call to "the strongest bunch of female legal scholars, law school deans, bar association chairs, and elected officials you can tap" to support John Roberts?

Yes, that's rhetorical.

2) I love the defensive paragraph. This is not a quota seat! Really! (Wink. Wink.)

3) I take it that the RNC believes women do not care about judicial activism.

4) Is this supposed to warm the Feminist Majority to her? Who exactly is the audience for this silly letter? Unless the RNC thinks that women need women to tell them something — then the chicks will buy it! — despite the lack of substantive evidence actually making the case they're supposed to be making.

I believe he just told Wolf Blitzer: ”These are needs that Iraqis want addressed.”

In other words, let’s not blame those who sabotaged the lines. Let’s blame the Americans. I mean, if Bush cared he would not have let this happen.

Next up is Ali Velshi. He says: “Under the Baath party these kinds of things didn’t happen.”

Yeah, let’s let the suicide bombers and decapitators take over. Let’s go back to the days when mass graves were filled with children and women were raped by Saddam’s cronies. At least the microwaves could be relied on and isn’t that what really counts?

The media never lets anything like FACTS get in the way of a good smear, eh? Where are those 10,000 bodies? Where are all those bodies that were supposed to be in the Convention Center freezer? Where is the cannibalism that Randall Robinson wrote about? How about those bombed levees, Minister Farahkhan? Where were the bodies so piled up that refugees had to walk across the dead? Where the "toxic soup" that was supposed to be left behind?

Friday, October 07, 2005

On a forum I used to frequent before it turned into a seething fever swamp of Bush Derangement Syndrome victims, the whole year of 2004 was filled with threads hijacked by Gore losers who sought revenge for Mr. No Controlling Legal Authority's inability to steal the 2000 Election.

As one of the few non-Communists posting there, I had the lonely job of speaking Truth to partisan insanity and was extremely unpopular for pointing out after John Kerry won Iowa that they didn't stand a chance of beating Dubya.

So blinded by their rage and hate, they chronically ignored my advice as to how they could beat Dubya. Now, America would be in smoking ruins under the joint UN-France occupation forces that Kerry would've ushered in and it was marginally better for us that Dubya got re-elected, but I'm interested in facts - something the Left had and has no use for.

I tried to point out that they were doomed because they were hoping that their Big Lie Smear Campaign would convince people to turn on Dubya. They pinned their hopes on Michael Moore and Dan Rather trying to foist dastardly lies designed to smear and cripple Dubya and tacitly endorsed the slaughter of our soldiers in combat to muster public opposition to Dubya.

The proof that liberals are a threat to the country is perfectly embodied by their willingness to kill our young men and women in uniform to gain political power for themselves and it's for this reason that they must never be allowed access to control of the government. That the banning of Dems from office leaves the Stupid Party as the default rulers isn't a good thing either, but at least we'll stumble towards Hell as opposed to running full tilt into the flames.

Anyways, the strategy they didn't try was THE TRUTH and getting the awful truth about Dubya's non-conservatism out to depress conservative turnout. Point out that he signed an unconsitutional abridgement of free speech in signing McCain-Feingold after saying he wouldn't sign, in hopes that the SCOTUS would bail him out (they didn't); point out that he refuses to defend the borders; point out that he's blown up the deficit, not because of the tax cuts (like the Lying Left says) but because he refuses to veto pork sent up by the Stupid Party; point out that he's mismanaged Iraq by pussy-footing instead of flattening and killing our enemies; and many more betrayals of his base's values.

Harriet Miers is his greatest FU to those who slaved for the cause and this posting on David Frum's Diary on National Review Online sums up the devastation Dubya has brought down own his own dumb head. Read it all, but here's some good juice:

These words need to be taken seriously. A Miers defeat, if it could be made to happen, would deal a serious blow to the Bush presidency. Conservatives need to think hard about that.

But Bush defenders like Hewitt need to consider this: A Miers win would also deal serious blows - to the Republican party, to the conservative movement, and, yes, to the Bush presidency.

Consider these hard political facts:

1) Hewitt foresees all kinds of Republican political opportunities in 2006. He's deluding himself. 2006 will be a high-intensity, high-turnout year for Democrats, as was 2004. The only way Republicans avoid disaster is by doing an even better job with turnout and intensity. And how intense are you feeling right now? The right nomination could have helped save Rick Santorum and Mike DeWine. This nomination could well demoralize the Republican voting base enough - in conjunction with immigration, over-spending, and the mishandling of Katrina, plus continuing trouble in Iraq - to cost at least two Senate seats.

2) The damage dealt to the conservative movement will be huge and lasting. As the conservative movement has grown and matured, it has necessarily compromised some of its early fierceness and idealism. Broad coalitions have to be built, elections have to be won, leaders have to be supported despite their inevitable personal imperfections. Through the Bush years, conservatives have shown tremendous discipline. They have accepted minor disappointments for the sake of higher priorities: the war, the courts. But if they accept this, they will be jettisoning every principle in favor of just this one: the leader is always right. That's not just unconservative. It's un-American.

3) At his press conference Tuesday, the president said he has "plenty" of political capital. He's wrong about that. If political capital means the ability to get your supporters to persuade people to do things they would not otherwise want to do - well then the president has just spent it all. It's too late for him to reach out across the aisle; he must depend on his core political supporters - and the harder he pushes this nomination, the more he will alienate them. His only hope to recoup is to reconnect with conservatives - and abandoning this nomination is essential.

Here is the fundamental reason why this is true:

George Bush has again and again called on conservatives to sacrifice for the success of his presidency. Whether it was McCain-Feingold or racial quotas or immigration or "Islam is peace," conservatives were urged not to let petty personal considerations distract them from the big picture.

But when it was the president's turn to make the biggest domestic-policy decision of his presidency, to fill the swing seat on the US Supreme Court, did he sacrifice? Did he point the general good ahead of his own petty personal considerations? He did not. He abandoned his principles, his party, his loyal followers all to indulge his personal favoritism.

He has done himself terrible damage, and he cannot fix it until and unless he breaks free - or is helped to break free - from this bad decision.

The benighted BDS victims refused to listen to my wise council when I told them victory could be theirs if only they gave up on trying to tell lies and opted to tell the Truth.

Dubya has shown us his Truth: He rewards his friends for their loyalty to him, but shows no loyalty to those who got him where he is.

The Stupid Party is going to pay for their stupidity. Unfortunately, that means the return to power of the fascist enemies within and thus the end of America.

Staff members for a champion of the right to privacy and a leading critic of identity theft fraudulently obtained the credit report of a rising black political star. Your turn for tough questions, Sen. Schumer.

While the media focus on House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's alleged skirting of campaign laws to get Republicans elected, former Education Secretary Bill Bennett's alleged racially insensitive hypothetical regarding blacks, crime and abortion, and Sen. Bill Frist's recent sale of stock, a real crime against a black politician has been committed in virtual silence.

Apparently nothing frightens the DSCC more than an articulate and charismatic black American who also happens to be a Reagan conservative. How else to explain the behavior of two of Schumer's campaign committee members — research director Katie Barge and junior staffer Lauren Weiner — who dug for dirt using Steele's Social Security number, reportedly culled from court records, to fraudulently and illegally obtain his credit report?

Columnist Michelle Malkin has reported that as of Sept. 30, according to Steele staffers, Schumer, who is a longtime crusader against identity theft and denies any knowledge of the scheme, had offered no apology for the invasion of Steele's privacy by people in his employ or given any hint as to what they were after or why they did it.

Can you imagine the media firestorm if staffers for, say, Frist, had used Barack Obama's Social Security number to fraudulently obtain his credit report looking for stuff to derail his Senate campaign? Frist would have been before a media firing squad faster than you can say Bill Bennett.

Go read it all and wonder what a Democrat has to do to get some coverage for their malfeasance.

Freewheeling young women in the United States and Canada first have intercourse at the age of 15, partake more in oral sex than previous generations and are far less prudish, according to a landmark new report by researchers at California's San Diego State University.

Between 1943 and 1999, the age of first intercourse dropped to 15 from 19 for females, while the percentage of sexually active young women rose to 47 percent from just 13 percent in 1943, according to the study that appears in the most recent issue of the Review of General Psychology.

"Feelings of sexual guilt plummeted, especially among young women. Attitudes toward premarital sex became dramatically more liberal over the same period," the analysis of 530 studies spanning five decades and involving more than a quarter of a million young people said.

Over the same 56-year period, approval of premarital sex increased from 12 percent to 73 percent among young women, while the figure rose from 40 percent to 79 percent among young men, according to the study.

The study revealed that the massive cultural revolution that swept North America in the past 30 years had contributed dramatically to the shift as movies and television shows tacked formerly taboo topics such as teenage pregnancy, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases and rape.

Is this really "progress"? Having our children engaging in potentially dangerous and destructive behaviors as a statement of liberation?

Of course, the moment anyone suggests restraint, the pro-promiscuity side shrieks about how rights are being trampled, male domination of woman, blah-blah-woof-woof. What has gone so haywire with society that the mere suggestion that girls wait a while and get to know the guy who's gherkin they're jerkin' is out of bounds?

The VRWC is getting more and more vocal about Dubya's non-conservatism (welcome to my world of several years ago, chumps), but until Rush and Hannity turn on Dubya and realize that for the few good things he's done, he's utterly failed at the rest and been plain clumsy about being a numbnuts to boot, things aren't going to change.

Things are gonna get bloody for the Stupid Party in '06 because while the moonbat fascists that control the Dems are absolutely dangerous to freedom, the Stupid Party has aggressively insulted its base and f*cked-up BIG TIME in its basic tasks and that's going to make the base damn reluctant to step up to defend Team Dubya, even when it's being unjustly smeared by the MSM.